WESTERNS don’t get more Freudian than “The Furies,” starring Barbara Stanwyck as a tomboy who’s a little too close to her daddy – and obsessed with inheriting his ranch. “The Furies,” out today on DVD, was directed by Anthony Mann, a critical favorite famous for his James Stewart Westerns and his later historical epics like “El Cid.”

Early in his career, Mann directed a series of low-budget films noir, and that sensibility comes through in the moody black-and-white cinematography for “The Furies,” which received an Oscar nomination.

Stanwyck, 43 at the time, gives one of her most vivid performances as Vance Jeffords, who lavishes back rubs on her widowed daddy T.C. (Walter Huston) when she returns home after a long absence. She worries about him losing the Ponderosa-like spread that she herself hopes to inherit.

The brutal T.C. looks the other way when Vance renews a dalliance with a squatter (Gilbert Roland) who has loved her since childhood.

But the old man’s incestuous feelings are inflamed when Vance takes up with gambler Rip Darrow (Wendell Corey), who holds T.C. responsible for his father’s death – and describes Vance as “a filly who never had a rope on her.”

It’s Vance’s turn to be jealous when dad brings home a new girlfriend (Judith Anderson, who resembles an older version of Vance). In the movie’s most famous scene, Vance hurls a pair of scissors into her rival’s face.

“The Furies” was the final film for Walter Huston, who died before its release. A stage-trained actor who had a substantial movie career, Huston won an Oscar for “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” (1948), directed by his son, John Huston (father of Anjelica and Danny Huston).

The Criterion Collection DVD includes a 1931 theatrical interview with the elder Huston, and TV and printed interviews with director Mann, who died in 1967. Perhaps the most unusual feature in the $40 box set is a paperback copy of the long-out-of-print novel by Niven Busch that inspired the movie.

Busch was a pioneer in Freudian Westerns, having written the novel “Duel in the Sun” (turned into a famous 1946 movie in which Walter Huston also appeared) and the screenplay for the 1947 movie “Pursued,” with Robert Mitchum.

But “The Furies” is the movie that set the mold for ’50s psychological Westerns – and set Stanwyck on a Western trail that continued into her 1960s TV series, “The Big Valley.”